


Daddy do you love me?

by adeegeeak



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Family Issues, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-17
Packaged: 2018-04-04 19:35:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4150221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adeegeeak/pseuds/adeegeeak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's one thing to think your dad's disappointed you. I know my dad's disappointed in me. All he ever wanted was a son like you." At age ten, Chuck Hansen loses a parent.  It takes three years for him to figure out he needs to be productive to be worthy of his family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daddy do you love me?

**Author's Note:**

> Pacific Rim Kink Meme Fill: http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/350.html?thread=4903262#t4903262
> 
> It will be updated sporadically and rarely. Updates on the Kink Meme first. Un-Beta'd and unlikely to be so.

Life in the dorms are hard. If you don’t contribute, you are sent onwards, and away in favor of someone who can. Techs train daily, hitting the gym just as often as they spend staring at burned out circuits, broken bits of machinery, and red marked simulations. It’s life or death for the Jaeger pilots and the Pan Pacific Defense Corp has no tolerance for failure. Bits of burned out circuits become lights, lights become displays, and displays save lives. Formulas etch themselves into the eyes of techs, as they fight to come up with the next innovation, the next big thing.

They dream in math, circuits and metal screaming and groaning around them.

Chuck does not.

Chuck dreams in the burning heat of black under his socks. He dreams in the screams of his father, reeling into his uncle’s arms, both bleeding and bruised while planes shrieked overhead. The cool eyes of a parent deeming him lesser, unworthy of time, as they train to fight in a new mechanical monster burns into his memory the way some people remember graduating. He is passed over, unimportant because he cannot contribute to the quest to kill Kaiju. 

“Hey Dad,” Chuck remembers starting one day. The small group of dependent teens and children attached to the training facility on Kodiak were going to be going to Anchorage for a visit to the Alaska Native museum and then out an hour’s drive to visit a small village. 

Herc glanced up briefly as Chuck ran up. A stack of books - it looked like heavy engineering - lay in front of him. “Not now.”

“But, Dad!”

The way his father slammed his hand down and roared, “I said not now,” remains perfect to his memory, even years later; the way the lights backlit his father’s body, the smell of metal, new floor, and plastic everything frozen in time. “Go find something to do!” He never went on the trip. Right before the class left, his teacher, a well meaning local lady, passed him off to one of the techies, instructing him to “Keep the Hansen boy busy.”

The tech, name long forgotten handed him a pile of circuits and order him to keep busy cleaning. Before too long, he was building, wielding and working. It felt good working. The techs praised when he did well, and yelled when he didn’t. They pointed out mistakes, told him if that mistakes was worth lives. For a brief shining moment, he felt..good. Not needed, but useful

Then it crashed down. A new teacher took the older one’s place and Chuck had stopped going. After all, wasn’t helping the techs out more important? He was learning practical skills, useful things, and what use was the names of dead American presidents when the world was ending anyways. The new administration felt otherwise and expressed this to Herc Hansen. 

“We are concerned about your son’s refusal to go to school,” the child service agent told Herc and Scott as the three of them awkwardly sat in a small office. As Chuck glanced around him, he saw piles of papers, tilting wildly in every direction, notes sticking here and there, scribbles listed and crossed out.He was keeping ‘busy’ wasn’t he? Hadn’t he found ‘something to do’?

“He hasn’t been in class for almost seven months.”

“He doesn’t appear to be communicating with his peers.”

“Have you considered foster placement?”

With every word spoken Chuck could hear his father’s jaw grinding, stone against rock, the shift of his uncle’s dress uniform against the hard plastic of the chair. 

“He doesn’t talk to us much.”

“I thought he was in class - he’s always carrying books around.”

And then after they were done…

“What were you thinking, how could you just skip classes like that!” 

“Are you trying to get in trouble?”

It’s funny how years later, as Chuck watches Raleigh fucking Becket being greeted by his father with a hearty slap to the back, that the memory of that awful, stiff meeting ten years prior pitches forward in his head as the American gets the place of honor on the table.


End file.
